I liked the idea behind App.Net (or ADN for the initiated) from the start; I’ve happily signed up during the initial funding effort and before it even existed. It is quite like Twitter, although it does have some pretty interesting API advantages that allow clients to do things that are not possible in Twitter such as creating private chat rooms (with Patter.) I found a text by Matt Gemmell, App.Net for conversations, that sums it up nicely:

The interesting part, though, is what you won’t be used to from Twitter. There are no ads, anywhere. Because it’s a paid service, there’s no spam at all; I’ve certainly never seen any. There’s an active and happy developer community, which ADN actually financially rewards. There’s a rich, modern, relentlessly improved API. And again because it’s a paid service, there’s a commensurately (and vanishingly) low number of Bieber fans, teenagers, illiterates, and sociopaths.

But the real difference I notice is in the conversations. On Twitter, the back-and-forth tends to be relatively brief, not only in terms of the 140-character limit, but also the number of replies. There’s a certain fire-and-forget sensibility to Twitter; it’s a noticeboard rather than a chatroom. Then there’s the keyword-spam (woe betide the person who mentions iPads, or MacBooks, or broadband, or just about anything). Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that any malcontent with internet access can create an account (or two, or ten) in seconds. Not a happy mixture.

I’d add that there seems to be less of a popular clique on ADN. Popular users seem to be much more engaging with “regular people” than on Twitter. And there’s the developers… although most of the rush is now behind us, it was fun to follow the developers working on ADN clients. It was a very collaborative effort, with alpha builds floating around and discussions about whether this or that should be done in a certain way.

As for the developers of ADN proper, well, you can try asking ADN CEO and Founder Dalton something to see if he’ll answer you in about 30 seconds. He actually does. :)

It all feels like a big community where everyone feels a bit like they own the place as well and want it to thrive. Again I think Matt is on the money on why this is so:

We value what we pay for. We not only pay for things which we deem to be of value, but we also retrospectively assign and justify value based on what we’ve paid. Any consumer is familiar with the simple psychology of cost equating as much to value after the transaction as value does to cost beforehand (likely moreso, from my own experience). At its core, I don’t think that the reason for the noticeably different, warmer, more discursive “feel” of ADN is any more complicated than that.

I personally love the service and I think you should consider it too. There is a free tier account that allows you to follow up to 40 people for free, as long as you’re invited by a current user. If you’re interested, I have a few invites.

Feel free to comment on this post by using Google+ or also by talking to me on, where else, ADN, where I’m @robteix. And of course Twitter isn’t going anywhere and I’m there too.

Eight years ago I joined a great company in Intel. It has been a great ride but as of a few minutes ago, I have informed my manager that I quitting my job for personal reasons.

A couple of years ago, I relocated to the software development centre in Cordoba, Argentina. It was always meant to be a temporary assignment but it ended up being longer than my family and I ever thought. And as our daughter grows up, it becomes ever more difficult to engage in international relocations, so my wife—who also works at Intel, by the way—and I decided that we needed to act. We set a hard deadline for the move and stuck to it. This is it.

My wife, daughter, and I at the Intel Miragolf site during the last Kids@work Day

My wife and daughter will be flying to Brazil in two weeks and I should follow some short time later, once I’m done closing everything behind. We’ll be relocating to Curitiba, where my wife and I first met 13 years ago, so it’s fitting.

So this is it. Good bye, Intel, it’s been fun and I wish you all the best.

A little context first. A little under four years ago I was relocated to Cordoba, Argentina for a stint at the local development center. My daughter Milena was two months old when she arrived her.

For the first year of her life, she was mostly unexposed to Spanish as my wife and I spoke Portuguese at home and TV was in English. When she was a little over one year old, she started staying at daycare as we wanted her to socialize and later because my wife went back to work. This exposed her to Spanish. So at this point, she was hearing Spanish, Portuguese, and English every day.

About a year later, she wasn’t speaking much yet and we inevitably compared her with other kids her age1, who were already saying many words, some already forming simple sentences. Our pediatrician told us many times that this was perfectly normal but finally said that if we wanted to, we could visit a child psychologist to calm ourselves. We did just that.

After a few sessions, the psychologist told us that we should probably not worry about some neurological problem2 because Milena did not exhibit any signs commonly associated with these problems. She did however told us that she was worried that my wife was working instead of staying home with her child. This led to two things: (1) my wife felt extremely guilty, while at the same time (2) we both felt that this was idiotic. It also nearly led to a third thing: we almost decided to stop going because it was not helping at all. But we still had two more sessions already scheduled and paid for so we decided to at least go to those.

My wife did not go to the next session as she was still angry at the psychologist for making her feel guilty. I don’t blame her. In this session, the psychologist told me that we should stop speaking Portuguese to our daughter. She said this was bad for her and that later she would have many years to learn other languages. In my head, I immediately dismissed this. But…

First-time parent that I am, I started saying a few simple things in Spanish to my daughter. Not whole phrases, but things that I knew she heard at the daycare. Stuff like “come here” and “very good!”, I’d say in Spanish. We went to our last session and the psychologist asked about it and I told her that I wasn’t really saying everything in Spanish but some things. She insisted that we should not expose Milena to anthing else. My wife argued that many said kids learn languages easily but we didn’t really push too hard: we would not get back.

We told our pediatrician about it. He said we were insane if we did that because he personally knew other foreign families whose children learned multiple languages and that is was perfectly normal for our daughter to take a little longer to start talking but that once she started, she’d speak both languages. We agreed. But…

Almost without thought, we continued saying some things in Spanish simply because Milena seemed to respond better. Saying “don’t!” in Spanish yielded better results than saying it in Portuguese, probably because she heard it often at daycare. This led us to saying more and more in Spanish. Coincidence or not, she started speaking more and more. In retrospect, we took the easy route. It wasn’t intentional but that’s what we did.

Now, she speaks well but only in Spanish. And we have been speaking only Spanish to her for almost two years. And this led to a point where I feel uncomfortable when talking to my own daughter. My Spanish is alright, but not perfect. And it does not feel natural to me. It comes out “artificial” for lack of a better word. Also, her grandparents don’t speak Spanish. Nor do her cousins: when they meed, there’s this “wall” between them. My nephews and niece don’t understand my daughter, which leads to frustration and lots of crying. Kids.

Well, a few days ago I decided to start an experiment. I now speak almost entirely Portuguese to her3.

I thought it would be tough and I am surprised that the toughest part so far has been ME. I got so used to speaking Spanish to her that I actually have to make an effort to remember to speak Portuguese. As for her, I am very surprised at how much she understands. I say fairly complex sentences and she gets them, whereas when I used to try those in Spanish, she wouldn’t. That’s obviously my Spanish’s fault, not hers.

She still responds mostly in Spanish but it is clear that she understands what I am saying. My wife and I speak Portuguese to each other, so she must have picked much from that. And being fair, I know she listens to pop Brazilian songs at daycare4 but still, I thought it would have been a little more difficult.

I’m happily surprised.

If you care to comment or suggest something, please do so in this Google+ thread. Thanks. And I’m @robteix at Twitter, so you can shout at me there as well.

I say “almost” because I still use Spanish for words that I know she doesn’t know yet. Like “pelota” (“ball”) and “rojo” (“red”). although I always make a point to tell her what the Portuguese word is so she’ll learn it. ↩

We catch her often singing songs from Brazil that she’d never listen to at our home — in fact just this morning she actually woke up singing “ah, se eu te pego, ai ai…” in bed, which merits a whole other post… ↩

We went to a hypermarket this morning for some needed groceries. While my wife went grocery shopping, I stayed with our daughter in the playground they have in there.

At some point, my daughter decided it was time to play in the little train they have there. An older kid was there but the little train has two seats so she went to the empty one and sat with the smile of the kind of joy only a 3 year-old feels when heading to enter a toy train. That joy was short lived as the kid decided he didn’t want to share and pushed her out.

I calmed her down and since the kid was already in the train before her, I decided it wasn’t worth it and just calmed her down. “Let’s go play over there and then we’ll come back later! Come on! Let’s go!” (Kids that age respond to enthusiasm.)

Fast forward to a bit later and the train was empty. My daughter decided it was a good time for a second try. She climbed aboard and started playing with the levers when the kid from before comes rushing and shouting “no no no no!” He then climbs aboard and throws her out. Let me make it clear I am talking about My. Little. Princess.

Oh boy.

“Hey,” I stared at him, “that’s not cool!” He must have been 8 or 9, my daughter is 3. He should know better by now.

He just replied, “It’s mine!”

“No, it’s not!” I said it back, the way adults talk to naughty children. “Where are your parents?”

Before he would answer, this lady comes and asks what’s going on. She’s obviously the kid’s mother. I tell her that he pushed my daughter out of the train and she’s looking at me like I’m speaking Russian or something1.

“Why can’t your child share it my son?” she asked, indignantly.

What?

“She tried to share it!” I protested. “Your son threw her out then. And now she was in there when your came and threw her out again!”

Iterating

Modern languages have long had some foreach equivalent that allowed us easier ways to iterate through these structures without having to explicitly worry about iterators types. C++11 is finally catching up:

for (string s : v)
cout << s << endl;

As well, C++11 brings in a new keyword, auto, that will evaluate to a type in compile-type. So instead of

Have you ever wondered how FORs impact your code? How they are limiting your design and more important how they are transforming your code into an amount of lines without any human meaning?

How can you not want to read an article that starts like that? I had to steal the intro from the original. Seriously, I have used FOR since I learned BASIC back in the day. I never thought about how it was limiting my design. I. Must. Learn. How.